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Category Archives: Opinion

Go with the grain

Friday, September 24, 2010

Go with the grain. When you’re planing wood, you have to follow the grain of the wood. The grain has a direction, which depends on the cut of the wood. (which is the way it grew). Do that and you’ll end up with thin shavings and a smooth finish.. Go against the grain, and you’ll [...]

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The hidden cost of building

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Thanks to EJ Ciramella for this thought provoking post. There’ll be a Build Doctor T-Shirt on it’s way to him soon. In this down economy, irrespective of size of company involved, people want to save money, limit costs and increase throughput of their systems. One area of savings is the build and continuous integration environment. [...]

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Sticking plaster over a gaping wound

Sunday, January 4, 2009

Another thing that I learned in 2008: the build manager can’t be responsible for ensuring the quality of the code that they build and deploy. We had QA’s but there were loads of little things to check: Were the release instructions accurate? Was there a rollback process? Did all the scripts actually work? I did [...]

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Your version control system is not a file system

Friday, August 22, 2008
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NAnt vs Ant: locations (NAnt Rant)

Thursday, May 29, 2008

(Image taken from Nesster’s Photostream) I think it was 2002 when Dan North took me under his wing and showed me the location attribute of Ant. That was then. Now, I’m doing a lot of .NET build engineering. And I’m dying for this feature. Here’s an Ant build to demonstrate: <project default=”properties”> <target name=”properties”> <mkdir [...]

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